In today's world of interstate highways, instant communication, and drone delivery, it's almost impossible to understand the earth-shaking significance of the day workers completed America's first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869 (pictured).
It's likewise hard to believe that a moment so antiquated was actually captured — with terrific clarity, no less — on film.
Andrew J. Russell/Yale University Libraries/Wikimedia Commons

It's not unbelievable that this moment would be photographed, but it is strange that it's not more widely known due to what it depicts and the fact that it provides the portrait of Nazi pageantry you'd think would be burned into our collective memory.
Indeed, with bold colors and an enormous Reichsadler, it was a scene of spectacle when Hitler addressed the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin on December 11, 1941 to declare war on the U.S.
German Federal Archives/Wikimedia Commons

Popular photos of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings often capture the event from an aerial perspective.
While this perspective makes for a powerful image, it obviously doesn't capture the blasts' terrifying scope to those on the ground at the time. This is what makes this photo of the atomic cloud rising over Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 so devastating. The blast pictured here would soon kill at least 75,000 people.
Hiromichi Matsuda/Wikimedia Commons

In many ways, the technological advancements pioneered by Thomas Edison and other prominent 19th century inventors gave birth to modernity. Because of Edison inventions like the light bulb, the motion picture camera, and the phonograph, people now had entirely new ways to record and communicate the human experience for both ourselves and the generations that followed.
In spite of our familiarity with Edison's inventions, it's rare to see the genesis of those inventions themselves. Pictured: Thomas Edison unveils his phonograph in Washington, D.C. on April 18, 1878.
Levin C. Handy/Library of Congress

By 1873, the camera was an established enough invention that it wasn't unheard of for even a 19-year-old art dealer like Vincent van Gogh to have been photographed.
Not only is this just one of two confirmed photographs of the famous painter (and the only one of him post childhood), this photo provides a jarring look at the actual visage of a man we tend only to envision by way of his famous self-portraits.
Wikimedia Commons

Found: Never-Developed Photos of Mount St. Helens Erupting
Photographer Kati Dimoff found the film at a Portland Goodwill.
BY SARAH LASKOW JUNE 15, 2017
Kati Dimoff, a professional photographer, has a routine: Every time she’s in southeast Portland, she checks the big Goodwill there for film cameras with exposed, undeveloped film. She’ll take the film to Blue Moon Camera, a shop with a love for older technology, and have it developed. “They are one of the best labs in the country for developing old, expired, or out-of-production film,” she writes in an email.
In May, she found an Argus C2, which was manufactured in the late ’30s and early ’40s, with a roll of undeveloped film in it. It was Kodachrome slide film, and it was damaged. Blue Moon was able to develop it, though only in black-and-white, not the full Kodachrome color palette.
When Dimoff picked up the prints, there was a note on the package: “Is this from the Mt. St. Helens eruption?”
In a few of the shots, off in the distance, there was the mountain, with ash from the eruption spilling out of it.
Clouds of smoke from the eruption.
Clouds of smoke from the eruption. COURTESY OF KATI DIMOFF
That building in the foreground is the John Glumm Elemetary School, in St. Helens, Oregon.
Mt. St. Helens erupting.
Mt. St. Helens erupting. COURTESY OF KATI DIMOFF
The mountain last erupted in 1980, and Dimoff was hoping she might find the person who took these pictures. After The Oregonian published the photos on their website, along with a photo of a family that also appeared on the roll, she and the paper quickly heard from Mel Purvis, who recognized himself in the photo.
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He believes the camera belonged to his grandmother Faye, who owned a clothing store in St. Helens and had also visited his family that year, to meet her great-grandson. “She was a very independent woman,” Purvis told The Oregonian. She was born in 1899 and died in 1981, the year after these photos were taken. It’s a mystery how they ended up at the Goodwill.

On this day (2 February) in 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery.
The first graves in Arlington National Cemetery were dug by James Parks, a former Arlington Estate slave. Without him, the story of Arlington would be incomplete.
Parks was freed in 1862 under the terms of the will of his former owner, George Washington Parke Custis. He still lived on Arlington Estate when Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton signed the orders designating Arlington as a military burial ground.
Parks served in the U.S. Army from 1861 to 1929 by working as a grave digger and maintenance man for the cemetery.
When Parks died on Aug. 21, 1929, he was granted special permission to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Parks is the only person buried in Arlington National Cemetery who was born on the property. He is buried in Section 15, Grave 2.

While historians can argue about when exactly the Civil War ended, the widely accepted narrative states that it came to a close on April 9, 1865, when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Pictured: Soldiers wait outside the court house in Appomattox as the higher-ups work out the official terms of surrender.
Timothy H. O'Sullivan/Library of Congress

Much like the Eiffel Tower, it's hard to think of the Statue of Liberty as anything other than a timeless colossus. It was of course a statue built by human hands, and one which France shipped to the States in 214 crates and had an assembly cost of about $10 million (adjusted for inflation).
On June 17, 1885, those crates reached the U.S. and the great unboxing began. Pictured: The statue's face not long after removal from its crate.
Wikimedia Commons

This photograph — only discovered in 2010 and subject to much debate over its authenticity — is one of only two known images of Billy the Kid (the other technically being a ferrotype, and a rough one at that, from 1879 or 1880).
The 1878 photo here, however, presents Billy the Kid (left - obviously with a gun in his pocket) in relative clarity, playing croquet with his posse, the Regulators, in New Mexico.
Wikimedia Commons

Because the image of the Eiffel Tower is so iconic, there's a jarring visual clang in seeing it unfinished.
This July 1888 photo reveals a rare glimpse of the tower under construction, 15 months into the process and still nine months away from completion.
Wikimedia Commons

John Wilkes Booth was working with nearly ten other conspirators around the time he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. These Confederate sympathizers planned to revive the Confederacy by assassinating Lincoln as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.
Unlike Booth, they failed to follow through. Like Booth, they were eventually captured and killed. On July 7, 1865, four of the plotters — Mary E. Surratt, Lewis T. Powell, David E. Herold, and George A. Atzerodt — died at the end of a rope in Washington, D.C.
Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress

In this one-of-a-kind case, the photo itself is the event. This otherwise unremarkable view from the window of a Burgundy, France estate is in fact the oldest surviving, permanent photograph in existence.
Taken in 1826 or 1827 by French photography pioneer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, this image used a unique process known as heliography. First, Niépce set his camera to an eight-hour exposure over a pewter plate coated with asphalt. He then wiped away the areas of the asphalt not hardened by sunlight to reveal a primitive photograph.
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce/Wikimedia Commons